Tumblr | Fab forum

I loathe Facebook, which also amounts to a certain degree of self-hatred because I do use it. As a means of communication, promotion and organisation of events it has become a practical necessity in this slovenly modern age, especially among my generation. I don't post statuses though; I can't stand people who use it as a way to feel more important with constant updates on their life. Twitter is even worse. Admittedly I've never really perused Tumblr for its benefits or drawbacks.

It's disturbing to me how we are increasingly downsizing our life onto technological interfaces and making an obscene amount of shortcuts for ourselves; by existing partly as an account on Facebook, or having every single piece of information we could possibly need in the palm of our hand with a smartphone, it seems to me we're really becoming far too dependent on technology, and people (especially children) are becoming lazier and stupider as a result. You can see kids as young as 10 in Britain standing in groups on the way to school or wherever, lost in their phones, playing games, comparing apps etc. I'm sure a great deal of these kids are very intelligent, but is it really healthy for an entire generation to be weaned on this kind of intellectual complacence? Can you imagine how, not even that long ago, if you wanted to know about a subject you had to GET A BOOK OUT OF A LIBRARY? The mind boggles! The majority of people are satisfied with complete mediocrity, especially in arts, music and culture. Everything is too easy to make, and too easy to assimilate.

Now don't get me wrong, there's something to be said about the privilege of living in such a progressive and amazing era. The digital revolution is an incredible thing in many ways but it strikes me as unnatural for mankind to be so reliant on something synthetic. The most frightening thing is how quickly it's progressing; for example look at how mobile phones have advanced in the last 10 years, from green-screen bricks with a few rudimentary games to these sleek things that govern all of life's tasks for you and serve you up whatever information you may want at the touch of a button. I'm 20 now, and I shudder to imagine what things will be like when I'm an old man. I can't imagine there being much need for people to leave the house (the recent discussion of the "death of the high street" in the UK seems to only corroborate this idea).

Apologies for the rant, I have been thinking about this recently and wanted to get some of it off my chest! With people discussing the merits and demerits of social networking, this suddenly seemed the right place to do it.